Another Life Read online

  Gwen made her way up the concrete stairs. A detector registered her arrival and activated a bare bulb on the half-landing above. Through the big picture window she saw the rain drumming down on a back yard containing dustbins and a half-filled rusty yellow skip.

  By the time she and Jack had reached the top of the next flight of stairs, an old woman had appeared around one of the doors on the landing. She had long, grizzled grey hair and a face to match. Gwen held up the bags and nodded in the direction of the next flight of stairs. ‘Thanks,’ she told the old woman cheerfully.

  She looked Jack and Gwen up and down, considering their casual black attire and the water running off them on to the floor. Gwen watched where the drips were falling, and was aware that the gaudy linoleum on this landing outside the old woman’s apartment was scrubbed clean.

  ‘I can remember,’ replied the old woman in a measured tone, ‘when delivery drivers wore a uniform. But it’s all gone to hell these days, hasn’t it?’ And with this, she retreated into her apartment. Several security chains rattled as she secured them behind the closed door.

  Gwen abandoned the four bags of cheap groceries at the top of the stairs, propping the bags against the railings. Jack scanned again for radiation, and was satisfied when he found the area uncontaminated.

  Wildman’s apartment was one of two on this second floor. The door to number seven was painted in a cherry red that made a cheerful contrast to the other apartments that they’d seen so far.

  ‘Yale lock,’ Gwen told Jack. ‘Might be double-locked. But we know he’s not in anyway.’ She kept a look-out, watching for movement up and down the stairs, while Jack attempted to slip the lock.

  ‘Oh.’

  Something had surprised Jack. Gwen looked over to see that he was pocketing his Geiger counter but drawing his revolver from its holster in his great coat. He mouthed ‘Door’s already open’ to her.

  She reached for her own concealed weapon. Unlike Jack’s Webley, hers was a standard-issue Torchwood weapon. That meant non-standard anywhere else in the world, because their armoury issue was almost certainly augmented by alien technology. Jack was never particularly keen to explain to her exactly how, and she’d discovered that asking Toshiko about it was like requesting an invitation to a lecture on particle physics.

  Jack pushed the apartment door open with his toe, and they both flattened themselves against the wall either side of the outer frame. There was no response from inside. Jack swung around, his legs braced and his Webley held in a double-handed grip.

  From inside the apartment came a shrill scream and the sound of glass breaking.

  ‘All right, ma’am,’ Jack said, and stepped slowly through the doorway. ‘Stay calm. No cause for alarm.’

  Gwen followed him into the apartment, noting that Jack did not lower his weapon.

  A woman had pressed herself up against the striped wallpaper just inside the main room. Her brown eyes were wide, scared, unblinking. She couldn’t take them off Jack’s revolver. ‘Please don’t shoot,’ she begged in the voice of a schoolgirl, though she must have been in her mid thirties. ‘Please. Don’t hurt me.’

  At her feet were fragments of a small, glass-topped table and the ornaments that had stood on it. The woman had overturned them in her fright when she first saw Jack. She was wearing sensible shoes, no tights, just tanned bare skin.

  ‘Room’s clear.’ Jack raised his voice so that Gwen could hear from her position in the narrow hallway behind him. ‘Stay back for a moment while I sweep the place.’

  From her position in the hallway, Gwen could see Jack kick open doors to places off the main room. Bedroom, bathroom, saloon doors through to a kitchen area. Eventually he called to her that the apartment was secure.

  Gwen moved into the room and holstered her weapon. The whole room looked like it had last been decorated in the 1970s. The same brown shag pile carpet appeared to have been fitted throughout, trampled to death over many years.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Gwen reassured the frightened woman. ‘We’re police. Special operations.’ She showed the woman her ID. ‘What’s your name, love?’

  The woman seemed to slide down the wall as she relaxed a little. ‘Betty,’ she said, ‘Betty Jenkins.’ She had a South Wales accent. Swansea, maybe.

  Jack was openly scanning the room with the Geiger counter. ‘I thought Tosh said Wildman was a sad bachelor with no life?’ He was examining items in the room. A Men’s Health magazine, with a black and white cover of a strapping male model and a headline: ‘Six Simple Steps to a Six-Pack Like His’. Next to it, a thumbed copy of Radio Times from three weeks earlier. On the scratched coffee table was a single dirty coffee mug with a small plate of crumbs beside it. Cushions on the battered settee were all squashed together at one end, as though someone had piled them there when propped up watching the TV. The gas fire’s dusty back-plate suggested it hadn’t been lit for months, an impression confirmed by the positioning of a two-bar electric fire propped on a pile of books and attached to the wall socket by a long extension cable. By the door was a sideboard that must have been the height of fashion forty years ago, its formica top covered in old magazines, junk mail, and a battered letter opener.

  Like any newly seen room, it offered a useful insight into its occupier. Gwen sometimes tried to look at things in a similar way when she got home to Rhys and their flat. Whenever she did, though, she just found she got an overpowering urge to tidy up and throw things away.

  Wildman’s apartment walls held photo enlargements in A4 clip-frames. Most showed images of colourful tropical fish, clearly focused underwater near a sandy seabed or against the startling grandeur of a coral reef. One showed a trio of people, ready to dive, on a boat that floated in azure water beneath a cloudless blue sky. They were in wetsuits, masked up, thumbs raised, and their brightly coloured scuba gear made them seem as exotic as the fish. On a stand by the window was a rack of barbell weights. The whole apartment was stale, unaired, cold. It had that smell you got on the first day when you returned home from a fortnight’s holiday.

  Gwen helped Betty to the nearest armchair, an ugly, oversized thing in green Dralon. The frightened woman sank into it gratefully. She pulled the tails of her navy-coloured coat into her lap, and smoothed it over her knees.

  ‘I’m Gwen, by the way. Now, what are you doing here, Betty? Do you know Mr Wildman?’

  Betty took a deep, shuddering breath in. She seemed terrified still.

  ‘It’s OK. We’re concerned about Mr Wildman and his whereabouts. We want to help him.’ After a while, Gwen knew, the half-truths and misrepresentations came more easily. Wildman was stone-cold dead, glowing slightly on a slab back in the Hub’s mortuary. But they didn’t know all his movements before this suicide. Perhaps the woman could help. ‘Do you know where he might be, Betty?’

  ‘He’s in Egypt. Said he was going on a dive with some tour firm in… Dahab? In the Red Sea. I joked with him that he’d never get below the surface, because of all the salt, and he laughed because he said I was mixing it up with the Dead Sea…’ She trailed off, her voice failing. ‘The Dead Sea,’ she repeated, and her liquid brown eyes stared into Gwen’s. ‘Oh God. Tell me he’s all right. He’s not dead, is he? What’s happened to him?’

  Gwen shushed her, and held her shoulders to calm her. She was trembling in Gwen’s arms now. ‘We don’t know. It’s all right, don’t worry.’

  Wildman can’t have been thinking things through properly, Gwen thought. Because he’d been going to work for the past week – Toshiko had deduced that much from the badge-in records. It was uniquely Wildman’s thumbs that proved he’d been in Wales and not Egypt. So why had he told Betty he was going to be in Egypt? In fact, why had he told Betty anything?

  Gwen kept her voice soft. ‘What’s your connection with Mr Wildman, love?’

  ‘Neighbour,’ sniffed Betty. She plucked a hankie from her cardigan sleeve, wriggling awkwardly where she sat in the large chair. ‘I’ve been feeding his plants for him whi
le he’s been away. The succulents don’t need much, of course.’ She pointed to a pot across the room that contained a plant with pointed pale green leaves. It was the only plant that Gwen could see, so presumably there were more in the other rooms. ‘That’s his Amyris elemifera. Can’t neglect that one.’

  Betty was constantly watching Jack, warily considering his moves around the apartment as he continued to scan his Geiger counter. The clicking noise never got much higher than a steady ‘tut-tut’ noise of disapproval, even when he ran it over the unwisely chosen leopard-skin rug in front of the gas fire. He must have sensed her gaze, because he turned away from the kitchen area and treated her to one of his unexpected, dazzling smiles.

  ‘Cap’n Jack Harkness,’ he told her smoothly. ‘Do I know you from somewhere?’

  Betty broke away from his gaze abruptly.

  ‘Sorry,’ Jack said. ‘Thought from the way you were looking at me that you think you recognise me from somewhere. I get that a lot.’ Gwen wondered if he was hitting on Betty. She was a conspicuously handsome woman, slim and fit with short-cut blonde hair and striking cheekbones. Her smart A-line dress fell to just above her knee, revealing shapely calves and firm, smooth skin. So Gwen was childishly pleased to see the grin falter on Jack’s face as he held it just too long without getting any sort of encouraging response from Betty.

  ‘OK,’ said Jack firmly. He scuffed his way across the shag pile, and motioned Gwen to stand up. ‘There’s nothing surprising here,’ he murmured to her.

  Gwen cast a glance around the room. ‘Except for the decor that time forgot.’

  He clicked his tongue, in a way that reminded her of the Geiger counter. ‘No readings above the sort of background radiation there would be if Wildman had visited the apartment. Nothing to suggest the fuel packs are in here.’

  ‘Wildman probably just came in for a shit, shower and shave,’ suggested Gwen.

  ‘Yeah,’ Jack agreed. ‘Then hid the power packs elsewhere. So someone elsewhere in Cardiff could be getting a really big dose of radiation. Get on to Tosh and see if she’s got any way of detecting that.’ He indicated the bathroom door. ‘One more room to check.’

  Gwen smiled apologetically at Betty, and hunkered back down next to her to continue their conversation. She got no further because, just as she was about to inquire further about the absent Wildman, she was interrupted by a yell from Jack.

  It was a cry of shock and anger.

  Gwen bounced back to her feet, and rushed into the bathroom after Jack. He was struggling with a long beige towel that he’d got draped over his arm. But she knew that people didn’t wrestle with wet towels.

  It was the limb of some monstrous creature in the bath tub. There was no visible head or torso. The thing looked like it was just a collection of long, coarse-skinned arms emerging from the water in the bath. Two of them stretched up across the off-white tiles opposite, and made a soft popping sound as their suckers detached and reattached themselves to the smooth surface of the wall and shower screen. The other two draped over the edge of the tub, a metre long apiece. Gwen steadied herself on the linoleum, which was soaked in water that had splashed over the edge of the bath. The nearest of the monster’s limbs had seized Jack’s right forearm. It was wrapped firmly around the sleeve of his greatcoat and was dragging him, skidding him, across the floor. He must have struggled to draw his revolver with his left hand, because it was lying in a pool of water beside the bath panel.

  Gwen stared, appalled. She went cold with fear as she recognised what it was. ‘It’s like that thing you trod on when you confronted Wildman!’

  ‘I don’t care how pissed its big brother is with me,’ Jack yelled back, ‘get it off!’

  Gwen recovered her composure, and drew her weapon. She stepped sideways to avoid Jack’s back, straddled the toilet bowl to place her feet firmly, and held the pistol steadily in a two-handed grip, the way Jack had shown her in the Torchwood shooting range. Took a deep breath. Released it slowly and, while she exhaled, squeezed the trigger gently but firmly.

  Four shots in swift succession, deafeningly loud in the tiny bathroom. Four shots into the creature that writhed in the bathwater. Four shots that barely made it twitch.

  Just above the edge of the bath now she could see where the limbs joined the creature’s body. Underneath it a dark hole was opening up, and a tube began to extrude itself like some ghastly proboscis.

  No it wasn’t its nose, she realised with a thrill of horror. It was its mouth.

  Jack was being dragged helplessly across the room towards the creature’s maw, and Gwen couldn’t stop it.

  FOURTEEN

  ‘Still need some help here, Gwen!’ yelled Jack. His boots skittered on the wet surface of the bathroom floor. A grubby bathmat was crumpling up beneath one of his boots. The bizarre starfish creature itself made no noise, save for the slap of its arms against the wall tiles and the plastic side of the bath and into the water surrounding it.

  Jack tried to throw himself away from the creature, using the strength of his upper body to propel himself violently sideways. He smashed brutally into a flimsy bathroom cabinet on the wall. The mirror shattered, and the chipboard carcass disintegrated and disgorged its contents on top of Jack as he slumped to the floor. Shampoo bottles, a packet of razors, a plastic basket of individually wrapped soaps. Several boxes of plasters and Paracetamol struck his shoulder, and two bottles of aftershave rolled off his back. A packet of individual haemorrhoidal towelettes scattered around him like a dropped deck of cards.

  Gwen seized a bottle of pink aftershave – ‘Espèce! pour homme’, it told her. The revolting tentacle had now writhed its way twice around Jack’s sleeve. Gwen twisted the cap off the aftershave and tipped up the bottle so that the astringent pink liquid glugged out onto the bizarre starfish’s limb. The coarse skin bubbled and fizzed, but the tentacle did not withdraw. It didn’t even flinch.

  ‘Stop!’ Jack yelled.

  She pointed. ‘It’s starting to burn through it!’

  ‘Unless you got another twenty bottles, it ain’t gonna make a heap of difference.’

  Gwen stared desperately around the room. A hairdryer had fallen from the cupboard, and she picked it up as though it might give her some inspiration.

  ‘What the hell are you gonna do?’ bellowed Jack. ‘Backcomb it to death?’

  ‘Nowhere to plug it in,’ she admitted. It’s a bathroom, she thought. No plugs.

  Gwen cast the hairdryer aside, and it bounced off the sink and clattered to the floor, where it landed next to two empty tins of dog food that had been incongruously abandoned by the far wall. She scrambled over the toilet and back out through the door to the lounge area.

  Betty was still sitting in the armchair, staring towards the bathroom with a curious, strangely calm air about her. Gwen could understand that she might be in shock. ‘Get out!’ she shrieked at Betty. ‘Get out of here now!’

  The blonde woman didn’t need any more encouragement. She struggled up out of the armchair, pulled her coat around herself and fled through the hallway and out of the apartment. The sound of her flat heels trip-tripping their way down the concrete stairs in a flurry of noise quickly faded.

  Gwen shoved the armchair savagely to one side. She ran to the socket by the TV to ensure it was switched on. She seized the two-bar fire, flicked it on, and raced back towards the bathroom. The extension lead snaked and coiled behind her. For a second she thought it was going to tangle around the coffee table, but she freed it with a sharp tug that caused the dirty crockery to clatter onto the carpet.

  Jack was now lying lengthways on the soaked bathroom floor, parallel to the bath. His right arm was almost engulfed by the tentacle. Worse still, the second nearest limb was starting to slide out of the bath towards his leg.

  Gwen could feel the heat from the two-bar fire on her face now. She clambered up onto the toilet seat, hefted the fire above her head, and lobbed it over Jack and into the centre of the bath.

  The
fire looped overhead, snaking its electrical lead behind it. It splashed into the water.

  Immediately the room was illuminated by a huge flash. Blue-white sparks arced over the surface of the water. The repellent creature didn’t make a sound, but its three unattached limbs flailed and thrashed. They slapped repeatedly against the wall tiles, and cracked the shower screen from top to bottom. Water slopped over the edge of the bath and onto the linoleum.

  The tentacle that had wound its way around Jack’s arm whipped away with a slurping sound as the suckers detached themselves. Jack sat up abruptly. ‘Don’t touch the water!’ Gwen yelled at him, and he held his hands high up above his head in acknowledgement. He was able to shuffle out of the room and into the living area.

  After a few seconds, the blue sparks disappeared and the starfish ceased its thrashing motion. The limbs slid lifelessly down the wall, and the entire creature slid under what remained of the water in the bath.

  ‘Power’s off,’ Jack shouted from the other room.

  Gwen slumped in relief. She stepped down from the toilet, and picked her way carefully out of the drenched bathroom.

  ‘What the hell is it?’ she asked him.

  His expression confirmed that he was as baffled as her. ‘Sure looked like the daddy of whatever Wildman puked, didn’t it? And what was the deal with that aftershave?’

  ‘You’re right,’ confessed Gwen, ‘it would have taken too long to break its hold with that.’

  ‘No, I mean who wears that crap? It smells disgusting. Wildman is a sad single guy. Well, hel-lo. He’d get luckier if he wiped his face with his haemorrhoidal towelettes. Ow!’ Jack started shrugging his greatcoat off. ‘Ow! Ow!’

  He continued to struggle with the coat. Once he had shucked it onto the floor, he hurried back into the bathroom, still yelling in pain. He pulled off his sleeveless jacket, and slipped his braces off his shoulders so that they hung to either side of him. He wrenched his shirt off so quickly and violently that its buttons pinged off across the room. Jack plunged his right arm into the washbasin, and spun the top of the cold tap around with his left hand. He sluiced down his right arm, rubbing at his flesh with a towel that he’d seized from the nearby rail.